The surge in energy demand across the vast Asia-Pacific region, both in the advanced and developing economies it covers, was relentless over the past year and made it more difficult to demonstrate climate leadership.
The availability of renewable energy sources expanded rapidly, helped by the supply of solar and wind energy equipment from China, but this was not fast enough to meet the voracious needs of some of the most populous countries, including South Korea, India and Indonesia.
Driven by rapidly growing electricity demand, Asia’s share of global power sector emissions continued to increase, the global energy think-tank Ember found in its 2025 outlook. In 2024, Asia made up nearly two-thirds of global power sector emissions — double its level in 2000.
The 2025 Asia-Pacific Climate Leaders list (below), compiled with data company Statista, is topped by Taiwanese technology company Arcadyan, which also has some operations in China.
Arcadyan was able to reduce core emissions significantly through more use of green energy and low-carbon transport routes, while working with companies in its supply chain to lower carbon intensity. But it also showed the challenges, with less impressive gains in the overall “intensity” of its emissions when measured against revenue growth, and a B rating from CDP, which assesses companies’ sustainability disclosures.
Second and third places were taken by Japan’s Nomura Research Institute, an economic research and consulting company, and property-focused Japan Metropolitan Fund Investment Corporation, both operating in sectors which by their nature have smaller carbon footprints.
This also highlights the dominance of the region’s most developed countries in the list, led by Japan and Taiwan. Companies from those two nations alone made up two-thirds of those listed, followed by the Australian cohort.
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Making gains in populous and less developed markets such as India, for example, was more difficult. Energy demand in the country has risen sharply as property development continues apace, ownership of air conditioners and appliances rises, and industry expands.
India has seen the third-largest growth in power generation capacity in the world after China and the US over the past five years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported this month. Its wind and solar generation almost doubled over five years to 2024 — overtaking Germany to become the world’s third largest generator of electricity from wind and solar.
But about two-thirds of India’s energy demand growth was still met by fossil fuels — specifically coal power. This meant that the country made up 10 per cent of global power sector emissions in 2024.
China remains equally reliant on coal power, despite leading the world in solar and wind power installation. A dip in its greenhouse gas emissions recorded in the first quarter of 2025, while potentially signalling a historical emissions peak, could also be linked to slowing industrial production.
Across the region, as elsewhere, energy security and reliability are increasingly being invoked as a challenge to green goals, the IEA has noted.
The advanced economies of Japan and Korea are both very dependent on energy imports. This has in turn spurred those countries to invest in greener sources, but again at a slower pace than needed to meet their energy requirements.
The next wave of clean energy development can be expected to focus on three key areas: the push for grid capacity, energy storage and smart infrastructure.
South-east Asia is playing a growing role in clean energy manufacturing supply chains. The IEA highlighted that Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia were the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers after China in 2023. Asean countries (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) are also able to take advantage of falling costs for solar, wind and battery technology.
As in previous years, the Climate Leaders list focuses primarily on companies that achieved the greatest reduction in their operational, or Scope 1 and 2, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity over a five-year period.
Scope 1 and 2 emissions — “core emissions” in the table — come respectively from a company’s own operations and from the energy it uses, while intensity is defined as tonnes of emissions of CO₂-equivalent per $1mn of revenue.
Other factors are considered, too, such as companies’ transparency on Scope 3 emissions, which arise elsewhere in their value chains, and their collaboration with sustainability assessors, such as CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). These factors are assigned a score, which is combined with the reduction in emissions intensity figure to produce an overall total for each company.
The editors reserved the right to exclude companies if their broader environmental record — on non-GHG or chemical pollution, for example, or deforestation — was sufficiently disputed to undermine any claim to be a “climate leader”. Energy companies prospecting for new fossil fuel reserves fell into this category. Further details of the methodology can be found in the panel at the end of this article and on Statista’s website.
It is important to bear in mind that the methodology has several limitations.
It prioritises Scope 1 and 2 emissions because it is mandatory to report these, so data is both readily available and comparable. Companies’ Scope 3 emissions are typically the bulk of emissions, but because reporting remains voluntary and there is no standard metric, definitive comparisons are harder — leading to a focus on transparency instead of absolute numbers. And because the intensity calculation is based on emissions relative to revenue, some rapidly growing companies on the list actually increased their absolute emissions over the five-year period.
So we have factored performance on cutting absolute emissions into the scores, and this year excluded any companies whose increase exceeded 30 per cent.
Nevertheless, some of the data this research relies on — companies’ own carbon accounting, plus information submitted to CDP — may include inconsistent emissions figures or insufficient detail on carbon offsets. To compensate, the figures reported by some of the biggest emissions cutters, both in terms of intensity and absolute emissions, have been scrutinised by GreenWatch — a sustainability research team based at University College Dublin. Its findings have been added to the table as footnotes.
China’s companies are also notably absent, despite many becoming global green tech leaders, due to an inability to verify and compare the data.
The year ahead is a critical year for energy policy, but it remains to be seen whether the Asia-Pacific economies can break the historical link between energy demand and fossil fuel supply by accelerating the expansion of clean energy use at scale.
An Asia-Pacific Climate Leaders 2025 print and online report will publish on July 7, analysing some of the issues raised by this research.
Footnotes
[1] Compound annual reduction rate (CARR) based on the sum of Scope 1 and 2 emissions and adjusted by revenue growth between 2018 and 2023.
[2] Calculated for 2023.
[3] Absolute change in GHG emissions between 2018 and 2023. Positive values reflect a reduction in emissions, negative values an increase. All the companies on the list have, however, cut their emissions intensity.
[4] Scope 3 refers to indirect emissions, which can be reported for some or all of 15 categories and thus vary enormously. This is why absolute figures are left out here.
[5] CDP is a non-profit organisation that assesses how well companies and other bodies report on and reduce their environmental impact.
[6] SBTi is a partnership between CDP, the UN Global Compact, the World Resources Institute and WWF and helps companies set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
GreenWatch assessment
[a] This company’s core emissions intensity performance might have been different if the Scope 1 and 2 emissions detailed in its annual report were fully consistent with the figures it submitted to CDP, and if it had provided more comprehensive disclosures on the use of renewable energy products to offset Scope 2 emissions.
[b] This company’s core emissions intensity performance might have been different if the Scope 1 and 2 emissions detailed in its annual report were fully consistent with the figures it submitted to CDP.
[c] This company’s core emissions intensity performance might have been different if the Scope 2 emissions detailed in its annual report were fully consistent with the figures it submitted to CDP, and if it had provided more comprehensive disclosures on the use of renewable energy products to offset Scope 2 emissions.
[d] This company’s core emissions intensity performance might have been different if the Scope 2 emissions detailed in its annual report were fully consistent with the figures it submitted to CDP.
[e] This company’s core emissions intensity performance might have been different if additional information about the use of renewable energy products to offset Scope 2 emissions had been disclosed.
[f] Having reviewed this entry, GreenWatch does not have a material comment on this company’s core emissions intensity performance.
To make comparison easier, we have used the same GreenWatch footnote system as last year; this year no companies fall into categories [b], [d] or [f]
We are grateful to Greenwatch and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for providing analytical support to inform the Asia-Pacific Climate Leaders list
Methodology
The Asia-Pacific Climate Leaders 2025 is a list of 350 Asia-Pacific companies that have achieved the greatest reduction in their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity and made further climate-related commitments. These two factors are combined to produce an overall score for each company.
For the first of these, the compilers looked for the businesses whose GHG emissions intensity fell the most between 2018 and 2023. Emissions intensity is defined as tonnes of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions of CO₂-equivalent per $1mn in revenue. The 2018 and 2023 figures were used to calculate the compound annual rate of reduction, expressed as a percentage, which contributed up to 80 points out of a possible maximum of 100.
For the second, the compilers assigned a score based on: transparency and extent of Scope 3 emissions reporting; reduction in absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions; and commitment to net zero, CDP score and collaboration with SBTi. This accounted for up to 20 points.
All Asia-Pacific companies — defined as having headquarters in one of 14 Asia-Pacific countries — with a minimum revenue of $50mn in 2023 were eligible for consideration.
A call for entries in October 2024 invited prospective participants to complete a short questionnaire about their GHG emissions between 2018 and 2023, and their revenue over the same period (or, for banks and insurance companies, net banking revenue or gross premiums written). Statista also conducted independent research, scrutinising data from about 1,500 companies and inviting possible candidates to register.
For businesses with a CDP score, only those with a score of at least B- were considered. Companies that do not work with CDP were still eligible, but for any company annually emitting more than 2mn tonnes of CO₂-equivalent, a CDP score of at least A- was mandatory.
The editors also reserved the right to exclude companies if their broader environmental records, beyond reported Scope 1 and 2 emissions, were sufficiently disputed to undermine any claim to be a “climate leader”.
All companies for which relevant data was found in publicly available sources were contacted so that they could review the data. Of these, and the companies that responded to the call for entries, the 350 with the greatest overall score have made it into the final list of Asia-Pacific Climate Leaders 2025.
Fuller information about the methodology is available from Statista. Although extensive research was carried out, the list does not claim to be complete, as some companies did not publish their figures or did not participate.
